Welcome to the Misadventures of Widowhood blog!

In January of 2012 my soul mate of 42 years passed away after nearly 12 years of living with severe disabilities due to a stroke. I survived the first year after Don’s death doing what most widows do---trying to make sense of my world turned upside down. The pain and heartache of loss, my dark humor, my sweetest memories and, yes, even my pity parties are well documented in this blog.

Now that I’m a "seasoned widow" the focus of my writing has changed. I’m still a widow looking through that lens but I’m also a woman searching for contentment, friends and a voice in my restless world. Some people say I have a quirky sense of humor that shows up from time to time in this blog. Others say I make some keen observations about life and growing older. I say I just write about whatever passes through my days---the good, bad and the ugly. Comments welcome and encouraged. Let's get a dialogue going! Jean

Saturday, March 28, 2015

I’ll give you a tip: Never walk through the showroom of a
dealership unless you’re prepared to be wowed by their newest acquisition and
never, ever ask the salesman you’ve bought your last few vehicles from what
your trade-in value is on your present car unless you’re
prepared to be pleasantly surprised. In the past I've never bought anything over hundred bucks without researching it and sitting on the decision for a day or two but on
Wednesday I broke that unwritten Rule of Life here in Jean County. And how did
that happen? I’m not sure beyond the fact that my Malibu needed its 15,000 miles
maintenance done and I left the place with an agreement to buy a brand new Chevy Trax mini
SUV. All I had left to do to own the thing was to arrange for insurance, local the
title for the Malibu, get the money from the bank and return the next day. I
got a great deal! Minus the trade-in and GM Family First discounts and rebates,
the SUV now sits in my garage for just $9,000 out of pocket. Using Jean Math I’m also
deducting my income tax refund from that which drops the 2015 Trax down just under $6,000.

There goes the money for the trip to Alaska I was thinking
strongly about going on next summer and good-bye to a new iPad. That purchase is
getting put on hold---again---until I can sell a few more things on e-Bay. There’s
irony in waiting for an iPad, though, because the Trax has built-in Wi-Fi. I
still can’t wrap my mind around that feature. It even has a phone apt that lets
you lock/unlock the doors, hit the horn and flash the lights plus remote start
the vehicle. I would say the only thing you can’t do in that mini SUV is fry eggs
but that would be a lie because it has a household plug to run a printer or
whatever appliance you want including an electric frying pan. That should come
in handy should I ever find myself living in my car.

Impulse purchase or not, after a life time of driving pickup
trucks and full sized SUVs I haven’t felt safe in the Malibu and it certainly
has contributed to me being afraid to drive in snow these past two winters. I’ve
also missed having cargo space, sitting up high enough to see ahead in traffic
and having a back-up camera. It should be a law that everyone over seventy
has a back-up camera, especially those of us who have driveways with
blind spots. The neighborhood mothers can rest easier now that I’m no longer the
old lady backing up on a driveway that tempts kids on tricycles to go "weeeee!" all the way down the incline.

When I bought the Malibu a few months after Don died, it was
the first major purchase I made with the exception of a cemetery stone and at
the time I couldn’t get rid of our Traverse with the wheelchair lift fast
enough. If I could have left his memory service and sold it on the way home I
would have. It was depressing me to see keep seeing the place where the EMTs worked on him just before transferring Don to their ambulance a week or so before he died. I sold the Traverse to a relative for a few thousand
over trade-in value, saving them a ton of money over dealership prices. They
were (and still are) happy and for a while I was happy, too, to be driving the
little Malibu. But over time I realized I missed having haul-stuff-around space
inside. But mostly, I seriously missed feeling confident and safe driving in
the winter.

The Great Debate:Please
weigh in on the great sweater debate going on in my head. Is this toddler sweater doomed to win the ugliest sweater contest or something else?
I had fun making up the
color blocking as I went along but I'm not sure if I should be embarrassed (or not) to give it to the senior hall craft sale and more importantly, make any more crazy sweaters to donate. (Note: The green didn't photograph well. It's a clear, primary color green.)

Wednesday, March 25, 2015

On Tuesday I had something interesting penciled into the day
planner. I went to lecture followed by a special screening of the Monuments Men movie. You may remember
hearing about this George Clooney film when it hit the movie theaters last year.
It’s about an actual event in history where men from around the world were
charged with finding art works stolen and hidden by the Nazis during World War
II. The daughter of one of the actual members of the Monuments Men was the
guest lecturer---she was born and raised in a near-by town---and she shared her
father’s personal stories, letters and photographs of the recoveries of the stolen
art in which he took part. He helped catalog the thousands of
pieces of art found in two salt mines and with trying to local their rightful
owners.

It was a fascinating story and one the daughter didn’t fully
appreciate until a friend called her one day to tell her that her father’s photo
was in the latest Smithsonian Magazine. She went online, left a comment on the article
and the next day she got an email from a man writing a book about the Monuments
Men. He wanted to interview her and her mother and within a week, the author flew
in from Texas with a camera crew and he left with some of the memorabilia that
her father had kept in a box labeled, “Army Stuff. Do NOT throw out.” Fast
forward: The book got optioned for the movie, she was an invited guest at the
Michigan premier of the film, the local newspaper picked up the story and she
began getting asked to speak to groups around the state.

Once a month I talk politics with a life-long friend of my
husbands, or rather I should say we vent to one another. We’re both liberal
democrats and as the next presidential election winds up we’ll talk more
often. It’s been that way since Don lost his speech and before that it was my
husband and his friend who’d have these political conversations. He’s my political ‘pigeonhole’
friend. If I want to talk dogs I call a certain pigeonhole friend and if I want
to hear some family gossip, I call a sister-in-law who knows it all. If I want
to talk books I’m up a creek without a paddle because no one I know
reads for pleasure anymore. Online reviews are a good substitute for real conversations but after seeing what I did on Tuesday I would have loved
having a pigeonhole art friend to talk Monuments
Men and art with. I still can’t get over the fact that Hitler had left
orders---should he die---to destroy all the art that he had his military steal and hide, and they did start that process. It boggles my mind that a person,
even Hitler, could be that selfish and vindictive. So many of Europe’s finest
treasures---pieces by the likes of Michelangelo, Monet, Rembrandt, Raphael, Vermeer,
Leonardo de Vinci and so on---would have been lost forever if not for the quick actions of the 350
men who served in Monuments Men units.

When my political friend calls we’re usually on the phone a
good hour which is a long conversation in Jean’s World where, these days, I can
easily go a week or two without talking to anyone except the cashier at the
grocery store and the Starbucks speaker. During our most recent political call
I realized (not for the first time) that my conversational skills are slipping. I’m not as quick with
getting out my thoughts and words. I’m not forming easy comments to his
statements like I used to be able to do. Part of that is because since last
winter I’m not following the news as closely as I used to do but the other part
has me worried. Why? Because I’ve noticed the same, not-as-quick-thing when I’m
having shorter, more casual conversations with strangers and acquaintances. What’s
going on in my brain? Am I getting rusty because I live alone? Is this just something
that happens as we age? Because it’s embarrassing when the words don’t flow
like they used to, do we start pulling back from even attempting casual
conversations? Ohmygod, I hate thinking about all this!

A footnote on Tuesday’s lecture: The woman who gave us such
a wonderful view of her father didn’t take the speaker’s
fee the senior hall pays out to the people we book. She asked that we donate it
to the Monuments Men Foundation. How cool is that!

Sunday, March 22, 2015

I am turning into a judgmental old lady who needs to quit
reading other widow’s blogs before I lose my head and leave comments I'll regret. Case in point: A widow in my age bracket is desperately
lonely and wants to find another man but she insists that any friendship she
enters into must be with a man who is likewise marriage minded. Why? Because
her religious beliefs prevent her from spending time with someone just for companionship.
Jeez, Louise, there’s full range of social interactions one can enjoy that doesn’t
include shacking up for illicit sex! Silly me, I thought sex outside of
marriage was the only part of dating or hanging out together that a church would frown upon. Lunch at MacDonald's? How
many Hail Mary’s would that earn a widow?And how
does that work out if a guy should ask this widow out on a date for
the first time? Does she say, “I don’t know if I can accept your offer, are you
interested in getting married soon?” That too-eager-to-get-married mindset scared
off the guys when we were eighteen, I would imagine it would get the same reaction
at seventy.

The truth is, we senior citizens have a whole different set
of issues involved with joining our lives together in marriage than young
people do. Young people don’t generally come into a marriage owning paid-off houses,
having pension plans and investment portfolios or have children and
grandchildren standing in the wings who you’d like to see get the fruits of
your life’s work when you die. Young people aren’t rooted in homes they’ve
lived in for decades or have to worry about becoming caregivers soon after
saying, “I do.” And they don’t have children who might worry that you’re
handing over your entire estate to a person they don’t know or trust. Sure, a
good lawyer can safe-guard against most of those things, but how many people
sign a prenup when they marry late in life? I've seen one too many farms that had been in a family for generations end up in the hands of the second spouse’s
kids to know that trust isn't enough. Get it in writing!

Those kinds of what-ifs drive me to distraction and the
bees start buzzing around inside my bonnet. It also drives me crazy that another widow I've known half my life gives her kids
ten to fifteen thousand dollars at a whack yet she counts pennies and does
without necessities because she’s afraid she’s going to run out of money. “Stop
giving away the money meant for you to live on!” I tell her. “If there’s any
left over when you die, then they can have it.” To which she replies, “You don’t
have children so you don’t understand.” I understand that one of her daughters
has a beautiful hardwood floor thanks to her mom’s ‘donation’ while the mom doesn’t
have enough money in her wallet to pay for her prescriptions.

In another blog I read recently, the “other woman” in a love
triangle was complaining because the widow to the man she was having the affair
with isn’t changing her last name back to her maiden name now that he's dead. They’d
been married for over two decades and even if he was a bag of cheating crap
they had kids together, for crying out loud. If the widow wants to keep or
ditch a surname, that’s her choice. How do people come up with things to resent like
that? And get this, the “other woman” wants to change her last name to match
the dead guy’s. I guess the tattoo she got to commemorate his passing wasn’t
enough. Make me a promise. If my values and sense of logic and fair-play ever
sink this low, just book me as a guest on the Jerry Springer Show because that’s where I’d belong. And while I’m
standing on my judgmental soap box, ladies, I don’t care what excuse a guy gives you for
not leaving his wife, it’s just an EXCUSE. It’s called having his cake and
eating it too.